PT Cruiser Forum

Hello. I have 2001 PT Cruiser that intermittently won't shut off when the key is turned to the off position. This first happened in Nov. of 2009 and the dealer at that time replaced the ignition switch. It's been working great until yesterday when the problem reappeared. It will eventually shut off if the key is left in the off position, but it can take a minute or two. Can this be another bad ignition switch or is it possible that something else is at fault here? Has anyone else had a problem like this that was repaired? How common is this with the PT's? The dealer says they haven't seen this issue before? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Welcome to the forums.
When I read the first line of your post I imediately thought "ignition switch".
If it's happening again, maybe the wiring is screwed up?
No jiggling of the key, just wait and it shuts off?
Sure isn't common....

Hello, thanks for your reply. No jiggling of the key. I just turned the switch to the off position, then to the on postion again and it still didn't shut off. So not knowing what else to do I left it in the off position and it eventually shut off. Again the switch was replaced in Nov. of last year because of this problem, and it worked without incident until yesterday. If it was a wiring problem I would think it would have surfaced prior to 5 months of it working. But I don't know. This is a great forum and I appreciate all of the help. Thanks!

I think if it was dieseling the dealer wouldn't have changed the ignition switch and the problem would't have gone away (sorry Chris) but the problem did go away for all this time so I'd guess a QSD said, wiring problem or the ignition switch again. Since it's happening so little (far apart) it's hard to diagnose without tracing all the wiring down and that could cost you more than just putting in another switch. You don't happen to carry a lot of weight on your key ring do you? We've heard of that being a problem over a period of time.

Haha it's fine Carey, like I said, it just popped into my head, and I just figured that since he said that the issue returned it could possibly be something unrelated to the ignition switch. After all, the dealer did say that they've never seen anything like it.. so..

Thanks to everyone for your help. The car has been working fine since I last posted. But I noticed that the positive and negative cables have a significant amount of corrosion on them. So I ordered new cables. They were only $70.00 so I thought they may be worth a try.

P.S. The dealer had the car all day on friday and couldn't reproduce the problem. I'll keep everyone posted on this.

My PT hasn't done this again since my post in April. It's certainly a weird issue. A local Technician mentioned he has seen this problem once in the last 10 years. He said it ended up being the fan relay located in the main fuse and relay box under the hood. He said if the problem happens again, to unplug the fan relay. If the engine stops running, then the relay is the problem.